Ezra Pound Biography

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Ezra Pound

Visionary, literary pioneer, traitor, poseur, genius. All of these terms have been used at one time or another to describe Ezra Pound, considered one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. A controversial figure within modern poetry, Pound has also been one of its most important contributors. His Cantos, a half-century attempt at codifying his chaotic world in verse, is considered one of the premier achievements of modernism, indeed of poetry from any age, yet one of the least-read "great" poems in the English canon. In an introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot declared that Pound "is more responsible for the twentieth-century revolution in poetry than is any other individual." Four decades later, Donald Hall reaffirmed this appraisal in Remembering Poets, noting that "Ezra Pound is the poet who, a thousand times more than any other man, has made modern poetry...